Should United Sue Google for Loss of 300 Million Dollars & Reputation?

You all know now that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today’s news. The story was rapidly picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United’s total market cap yesterday) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story.

This story highlights the unhealthy importance of Google on world economy. Google’s action (intentional or not) can be directly attributed to over 300 million dollar loss by United and a loss of face. Should Google be sued for this mistake?

Think about it. If Google had intentionally planted this false story about United’s bankruptcy then I am sure all of you would agree that Google should be sued. However Google says that it didn’t do so and was trigerred by a mistake in their bot. All we have is Google word of honor! Can just Google’s word be trusted for this major loss of United?

Why place so much trust on Google? After all it is just another public company and like all public companies its ultimate goal is to increase shareholder value.

On a similar note why allow Google to be the judge, jury and executioner of the internet (via search)? Today Google can at its whim ban any site from its index and relegate it to internet oblivion. The site owner has no recourse but to plead (often fruitlessly) for reinstatement. It appears the trillion dollar internet economy is standing solely on top of Google assumed fairness and its professed “do no evil” policy. Don’t you think that’s too flimsy a ground to stand for the net economy?